Another of my favourites, originally based on an Italian recipe from a deli that used to be owned by our friends Lee and Mimo. This can be used to make a burger or sausage, it’s up to you.

5 lb minced pork
3 ts Fennel seed
2 ts fresh ground Pepper
1 1/2 ts Sage Leaves
5 Cloves pressed garlic
3 ts Salt
1/2 pint  red wine

For sausages you can add 1/2lb of fresh bread crumbs and soak in the wine before combining. The traditional italian sausage would possibly not use any bread crumbs as it is a coarser, more “burger like” consistency.

Mix well and stuff into sausages casing or press into burgers. If making sausages, this is best produced unlinked and portioned into 2lb rings. The rings can be cooked just as well in one piece in a frying pan or, crossed through with skewers, on the barbecue.

Any hearty red wine works well with this and possibly a bit of homemade chilli sauce.

1 Meat.
Now this is the gory bit that gets people thinking about whether a sausage is a by product of butchery or the reason for it. What I mean by this is, is the sausage there to mop up the waste or not. By law, a pork sausage has to contain a minimum of 42% meat, after allowable fat and connective tissue content, this leaves about 19% recognisable lean meat. A premium sausage will be at least 73% meat. Pure meat is not a good thing as you will have a burger in a skin which is not pleasant.

2 Fat.
Now I didn’t promise a totally healthy option here, this is a treat, but using the fat contained within the meat rather than adding meat is a bonus.

3 Rusk.
This is the other main texture in the sausage. It holds moisture and prevents the meat from becoming the all in one solid lump. Meat and rusk are two different products and don’t gloop together. In some sausages this is achieved by using bread crumbs.

4 Fluid.
Water, beer, wine or even fruit juices can be used to hydrate the rusk and give that delicious moistness that is essential in a good sausage. This is not about creating a slurry, far from it, this is a clear component and should be a sensual detection seperate from the meat and the rusk. The South African boerworst is a great example of this with a hefty glug of wine. From time to time, we use local beers as a flavour in their own right, a real celebration of Burton.

5 Casing.
This is the skin that hold the Great, British sausage together. Whether it is beef (tough), sheep (delicate), pork (in between) or collagen (all rounder), the casing creates the internal cooking environment of the sausage.

There are other ingredients such as spices and herbs which complete the flavour and texture of the sausage, but the real credit goes to the 5 above. All of these can be fantastic natural parts of the sausage jigsaw. A great sausage is just that, pride in ingredients and above all, British.

Today saw the arrival of Dan’s new ice cream maker, which he has been dropping hints about for a couple of months. The lavender has flowered in the garden and he’s keen to come up to the house and harvest some as an ingredient. We are certainly looking forward to trying some of chef’s new recipes soon.

The next item on the shopping list is going to be something a little warmer, full of water and to be kept away from Dan. Hope you can keep a secret

Every so often, there is the Heston moment, not all restaurateurs have them and to be honest they aren’t that Heston when they happen Our’s was looking at the ingredients for our new house sausage recipe and discovering that we bought our craft ingredients from the same place that Heston does. That’s three mentions and we haven’t had a visit like in Beetlejuice. There’s no place like home, no place like home ….

OK, Dan and myself started playing in the kitchen with the idea of the Burton Sausage and to be honest, there is only so much you can do with Marmite before you join the hate-it brigade. The first prototypes had some great taste, but nothing compared with Dan’s experimentation over the next few days where he came up with a sample using some of the best local ingredients you can get.

The result was rather embarassing for me as I have made sausages for a few years and even entered some into competitions.  I was tasting the first of the new batch, Dan had left me on the starting line.

Take 5 great suppliers and a great chef, the results speak for themselves. The new 99 Station Street sausage leaves the kitchen, 7th April 2009.